Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:20:46 -0800Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:20:46 -0800Tonight's McMinnville High School boys' and girls' basketball games at Forest Grove have been postponed due to road conditions. The games will be made up Saturday (December 10) with times to be determined.]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:20:46 -0800She deserved more

It is commendable that the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office has admitted error in the suicide of Debbie Samples, but I think the most important, most central question is: Why was Samples taken to the jail at all? Suicidal and in desperate need of treatment, she is put into jail?

How can any reasonable, moral society justify such a thing? Why was Samples released from the hospital after being deemed suicidal by professionals at that hospital and not taken to the proper medical setting for appropriate care? That’s my question — for the sheriff, for the hospital, for all of us.

Rob Schulman

McMinnville(Schulman is the vice president of the Yamhill County Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.)

Parties at fault

The recent election shows quite clearly that the people running the two major parties leave room for improvement.

I’m not talking about the two presidential candidates or their vice presidential partners. On the Republican side, we have a long list of party big shots who spent the campaign telling us that their party’s candidate was beyond not qualified and was a downright dangerous threat to the nation.

Amazingly, these people have done an about face without skipping a beat. Mitt Romney is the latest to switch from calling Trump a threat to saying he’s a great guy who’ll be a wonderful president. No reasons are given for the change. Yesterday, Trump was a menace, and today he’s our salvation.

Come the next Republican primary, these unstable individuals should be replaced by steadier folks.

The Democrats offered a different flavor of political sewage this time round. Instead of finding their candidate unpalatable, the Democratic National Committee seemed to have a problem with the voters. Apparently the possibility that the pre-selected candidate might not prevail set off a panic. The extent that they tipped the scales in Clinton’s favor is an insult to representative democracy.

Reading the details requires some extensive Googling. The quality of the candidates aside, we voters should expect and demand better from the parties and the process.

Fred Fawcett

Lafayette

State shows flaws

Wait. You mean to tell me the state shut down a foster facility for youth, turned the youth out into the streets and then some kids ran and a few became pregnant?

How is that better supervision and care than the facility? And where are the state’s reports of abuses? Where’s the transparency?Foster parents in only four states (as of May) are paid less than Oregon foster parents: Idaho ($382), Missouri ($321), Nebraska ($345) and North Dakota ($390). See the pattern? Since when is the cost of raising a teenager $415?

Someone needs to investigate all health service branches in this state.

For instance, the Legislature refuses to pass legislation granting psychotherapists parity to collect from insurance companies. Only social workers are reimbursed. Social workers are not mental health counselors. Yet that’s what Oregonians get when they want counseling.Reciprocity (qualifying a license from another state) can take a year or more, and after hundreds of dollars in outlay, there’s no guarantee it’ll be granted. Get into the 21st century, Oregon.

A study released in September by the Oregon Women’s Foundation, women in Oregon drink more alcohol than women in all other states, and more women in Oregon are depressed than the women in all the other states.Gov. Brown, put your house in order.

Sheila Hunter

McMinnville

Tax nonprofits, too

“In a very tight fiscal environment, we can no longer afford to keep these types of preferential tax treatments.” (Gov. Kate Brown) Does this administration even consider a serious reduction in spending? I think not. So what does the governor propose to do? Raise the cigarette tax and liquor surcharge, which will affect low- and middle-income families disproportionately. Raise taxes on partnerships and subchapter S corporations, which will affect a disproportionate number of small businesses. Raise taxes on hospitals and insurance companies, which already take a significant bite out of family budgets at all levels — especially the lower and middle class. Maybe it’s time to shift the tax burden to those who have enjoyed “preferential tax treatments” for as long as I can remember. How about taxing nonprofit organizations? Let’s impose a tax on churches and religious organizations. But if we do that, then we should include other nonprofits such as labor unions, environmental advocacy groups such as Sierra Club and Greenpeace and a plethora of other special-interest groups.

Perhaps it is time for members of Oregon’s public employees unions to impose a self-determined surcharge and/or a tax on themselves to help bail out their own pension fund. Would that ever be introduced or considered by this administration? I seriously doubt it. They will continue to try and find ways to take from the worker bees and give to the drones.

Steve Sommerfeld

Sheridan

]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2016 09:27:49 -0800Last November, voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the political establishment about the need to put an end to the rigging of our elections by insider politicians and the monied elite.

No, I am not speaking about Donald Trump becoming the nation’s next president, but about two little-known county-level ballot measures that passed here in Oregon.

The first was Multnomah County Measure 26-184, which passed 90 percent to 10 percent, the widest margin ever for a Multnomah County ballot initiative.

his measure limits campaign contributions to candidates running for county chair, county commissioner, county auditor, sheriff,or district attorney to $500 per person — and zero from corporations or unions. The measure also limits independent expenditures in county races to $5,000 per person and $10,000 per registered political committee. It also requires political mail and advertisements to identify the top five donors to the candidate’s campaign, similar to laws in California, Maine and, now, South Dakota. Any advertising paid for by “independent expenditures” also must list the top five sources of funding.

This ballot measure has legal ramifications extending far beyond Multnomah County. It will set in motion a series of legal challenges designed to make the state of Oregon begin to enforce at least some of the campaign finance laws already on the books. One reason that proponents placed the measure on the ballot is under the last two Democratic administrations, the state of Oregon has refused to enforce campaign finance laws passed by Oregon voters — including a requirement that political advertisements disclose their donors — that have been uncontroversial for most of the state’s history.

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Oregon is one of only six states that does not place any limits on campaign contributions or expenditures for state and local races. Recently, state agencies and the Legislature have adopted extreme interpretations of the Oregon Constitution as the basis for not passing statewide legislation to give voters more information about the major financial donors to political candidates.

Not surprising, a 2015 study by the Pulitzer-winning Center for Public Integrity gives Oregon “F’s” in Public Access to Information and Political Financing, rating the state 34th and 49th, respectively, Oregon just barely beating Mississippi in financing.

If our system is rigged to give wealthy people and organizations larger influence in our elections, it is also rigged to protect a two-party system that often fails to reflect the popular choices of voters. But our system of elections is not written in stone. Most of it is not even written in the Oregon Constitution. Under the current system, local governments have options in how they will elect their representatives.

Which brings us to Benton County Measure 2-100. This measure, which passed by a two-to-one margin, introduces a “ranked choice voting” system that will allow voters to rank their preferences for county offices, instead of just picking one candidate. Under the new Benton County system, if there are more than two names on the ballot, voters will get to rank their top two candidates. If a voter’s favorite candidate does not win, the second choice will automatically be counted. The idea was the brainchild of Pacific Green Party activist Blair Bobier and backed by most of the third parties in Oregon, because ranked choice systems around the country have offered some opportunity for them to succeed in electing candidates to office.

As Kristin Eberhard of the Sightline Institute noted in a recent speech to City Club of Portland, ranked choice voting systems empower third parties by eliminating the “spoiler objection” that many voters have to choose a third party candidate, while also ensuring the preferred candidate of most voters wins in November.

These county-level changes are microcosms of a larger shift happening in America. Many of the forces that propelled Donald Trump into the White House — anger at the failures of our political system and a belief that the system is rigged against ordinary people — are also driving local movements demanding greater transparency in our elections, especially with regard to who is paying for them and whether they produce outcomes supported by the majority of voters. Many Americans want to “unrig” our election system by weakening the stranglehold Democrats and Republicans (and their big donors) have over our political process.

At a minimum, these kinds of pressures, along with third parties like the Independent Party of Oregon, should start to make the political establishment more responsive to ordinary citizens.

As the cowboy proverb goes, “If you want to eat steak, you can’t hang around the table begging for scraps. Sometimes you’ve got to go to the slaughterhouse and kick the door down.”

One factor seems clear from this latest election: Americans are getting tired of waiting for the two-party system to produce better results. Look for bigger doors to fall, if they don’t get the message soon.

That message was driven home with unmistakable clarity earlier this week, when parent Waste Management Inc. announced plans to reduce the flow of incoming garbage and increase the space available to accommodate what remains. Doing so pushes the fill date on the landfill’s currently permitted footprint into 2019, thus buying more time for ongoing legal and regulatory action.

The 87-acre fill was originally projected to reach capacity in 2014. Waste Management won the right to build a 20-foot berm along the highway, but at the current rate, the additional capacity will be exhausted out by April.

Meanwhile, the Court of Appeals isn’t expected to rule on the expansion plan’s latest 17-acre incarnation until late December. A legal victory there would surely be appealed to the Supreme Court, eating up at least two more months. And even if it succeeded on both fronts, the company would still need to invest additional months securing a state Department of Environmental Quality permit.

To buy more time, Waste Management plans to temporarily divert about 250,000 tons of annual Newberg and Metropolitan Portland waste to its massive Columbia Ridge Landfill, cutting the annual flow into Riverbend to a more manageable 300,000 tons.

The move means shipping waste almost 150 miles upriver, but to preserve its customer base, the company has agreed to absorb additional expenses.Waste Management also plans to re-contour the three oldest cells at Riverbend — clay-lined cells 1, 2 and 3 on the river side, which have settled significantly since first filled in the 1980s. A steeper gradient would allow them additional capacity without raising the landfill’s height or compromising its magnitude 9 earthquake resistance, the company says.

Beyond that, the company appears to be totally out of options.

It once considered building a berm along the river side, matching the one on the highway side, but environmental concerns made that a non-starter. And newer, better-lined landfill cells haven’t settled enough to make them viable candidates for re-contouring.

Consequently, this long-running drama finally has a clear and convincing end date — the spring of 2019. By then, Waste Management will either be moving into its final 10-year run at Riverbend, where operations commenced in 1983, or initiating the decommissioning.

Either way, we think we speak for the majority of local residents when we say that promises to come as a great relief.

]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800The commercial areas stretching along Highway 99W in McMinnville won’t win any national awards or earn any feature write-ups in travel magazines, as the city’s downtown “living room” has. But the busy commercial corridor is as important, if not more so, to the city’s overall vitality.

When the local Rite Aid moved to a new site nearby, we worried about the gaping space it left in the McMinnville Town Center mall. Large, vacant retail spaces along the highway can become eyesores symptomatic of economic distress, whether warranted or not.

So it was welcome news when Harbor Freight announced it would be moving into a portion of the former Rite Aid space this fall, with Planet Fitness filling the rest by January.

Those two new businesses are neighbors with a UPS shipping outlet, a Radio Shack, a locally owned Hallmark shop, a health food store which recently celebrated 40 years in the same location. Such is the diversity of amenities included in neighborhood and community malls.

While Third Street is the hub for tourists, diners and boutique shoppers, the vast commercial lands lying along McMinnville’s 99W spine are what make the county seat a regional center, capable of serving smaller surrounding communities that lack the population to attract the full range of vendors.

Commercial malls represent a major component in a healthy economy.

They house shops providing jobs and serving to keep money in town. Without them, we’d all be shuttling to and from Salem or Portland Metro for routine needs. Having the totality of a sale remain in the community is always preferred, but having a portion of sales remain, as is the case with outlets belonging to national chains, is better than seeing all those dollars spent elsewhere.

There’s no data on local vacancy rates for neighborhood and community malls. But we would guess McMinnville falls well below the 10 percent national average.

Maintaining a high level of mall occupancy requires continued investment and, often, a measure of out-of-the-box thinking. Take, for example, the Mayfair Plaza, anchored by Grocery Outlet.

The plaza underwent a major overhaul a couple of years back, getting an updated facade in the process, in order to keep from being viewed as dowdy and out of date. And it was recently rewarded with the debut of Mattress Mania in a space vacated when Sears relocated.

We’ve been blessed with another example courtesy of the off-highway Bohemian District, across from the county transit mall on First Street. The owner is in the process of gracing the mini-mall located there with new design and architectural elements.

The News-Register’s most recent edition of its Indulge Yamhill Valley dining guide features two more examples, both featuring locally owned restaurants. Banner’s went in next to Dollar Tree, on the east side of the highway, and Eiffel Grill in next to Mikey’s Pizza, on the west side.

The importance of this sector should not be forgotten or taken for granted. Diversity is important and highway malls help provide it.

GRAND RONDE - Highway 22 west of Grand Ronde, at its intersection with Grand Ronde Road, is closed because a number of trees have fallen, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation.

There is the possibility more trees will fall onto or near the highway.

Motorists should avoid the area and take alternate routes.

]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800Grizzlies and Wildcats will mingle and reminisce at a Jan. 7 memorial service for Perry Stubberfield, and the source for many of their stories will be the man they are there to honor.

Perry’s 78 years in McMinnville were those of student-athlete, teacher, coach, administrator and longtime sports raconteur. And yes, Perry would have bristled and said something pretty funny about the notion of being a “raconteur,” preferring the more down-to-earth synonym, teller of tales.

People associated with Linfield College and McMinnville High School sports Hall of Fame programs have long depended on Perry’s memories of the players, teams and coaches from more than a half century of local athletics. He brought those memories to life with personal recollections revealing the most human, most humorous, most memorable qualities of the people and events.

That mantle perhaps falls to another former Grizzly and Wildcat, Ross Peterson, who followed a decade behind in many of Perry’s footsteps after being one of his first students at McMinnville Junior High in 1962-63. That role should be a comfortable assignment for Peterson, already known for his vast recall and deep appreciation of Stubberfield stories and many more.

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“People often talk about what a great coach Perry was,” Peterson said this week, “but I remind them he was the best teacher I ever had.” Back then, freshmen headed up the three-year junior high, and so many of them flocked to Perry’s speech and drama class that they had to dramatically expand the school program.“Perry,” Peterson said flatly, “was the reason I went into education.”

One story, unconfirmed but believable, recounts some simple, sensible advice Perry received as a new teacher from a veteran McMinnville educator: “Be fair, firm and friendly … it works pretty well around here.”

Of course, it takes more than passing advice to instill such qualities into someone’s life, but those were everyday standards Perry brought to the game … the game of sports, the game of life, and now, the game of remembrance.

I once wrote about the Eastern Oregon “gang of 12” who populated so many McMinnville teaching and coaching positions in the 1950s and ensuing decades. Only one survives today, that being Jerry Sherwood, whom I saw walking down Third Street this week.

People who picture that group gathering in the great hereafter will smile at the image of them enjoying tales from their own rich lives as told by newcomer Perry Stubberfield.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.

BEND — Legislation passed in Oregon is shining a new light on dyslexia, an often misunderstood learning disability.

Senate Bill 612, which went into effect in July 2015, requires that every kindergarten and first-grade public school student be screened for risk factors of dyslexia, a learning disability that can make it difficult to learn to read and write. Looking for signs a student may be likely to have dyslexia can allow for early intervention, something that can make a huge difference in how it affects a child, according to dyslexia experts.

Much of what the Senate bill mandates falls on the Oregon Department of Education to administer. The bill requires the state Education Department to hire a dyslexia specialist to support school districts in their new role in screening for risk factors.

Carrie Thomas-Beck, a former special education teacher from the Midwest who co-directed the Oregon Reading First Center, which sought to improve reading among elementary school children, became the state dyslexia specialist in January. She calls dyslexia a “learning difference” for the children who have it. Dyslexia is genetic, she said.

“So they are born with it,” said Thomas-Beck in a call from Portland. “Where children experience it has to do with early intervention.”

Dyslexia isn't a one-size-fits-all learning difference. It can be different for different children, Thomas-Beck said.

“Dyslexia by definition is not a difficulty with vision — they see print just like anybody else,” Thomas-Beck said. “It's a language disability.”

Although some might have believed dyslexic individuals see letters reversed, that's not the case, according to Thomas-Beck. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty hearing and isolating sounds in spoken words, she said.

“Listening comprehension is often a strength,” Thomas-Beck said. “Often they are quite articulate and have great vocabulary, but might have trouble with word-finding, or they'll store a word inaccurately.”

Thomas-Beck said academics sometimes use this example: A student may want to share a thought about volcanoes, and know its meaning, but might say “tornadoes.”

“It goes back to word-finding,” she said.

Dyslexia is generally obvious in a person's spelling and writing, according to Thomas-Beck. A person might also have trouble organizing ideas, and lack punctuation, as well as connecting words.

Students get so bogged down in just trying to figure out how to spell a word or use basic writing conventions that they can't get sophisticated ideas to flow out on paper, Thomas-Beck said.

“Orally they could share it in a way that makes perfect sense, but written, they might do it simply,” she said.

Still, she added, it's different from person to person. Dyslexia can occur as commonly as 1 in 5 people, Thomas-Beck said. Other estimates show about 85 percent of students with learning disabilities have a disability in reading and language processing, according to the International Dyslexia Association.

A lot of times, kids with dyslexia don't qualify for special education because they do so well in other areas. They might dedicate hours after school to assignments that may only take a half-hour for their peers to complete, Thomas-Beck explained.

Through legislation, the state is building awareness, Thomas-Beck said. Another piece of legislation, House Bill 2412, which went into effect Jan. 1, addresses how teachers are trained for dyslexia education. Decoding Dyslexia, a grass-roots parent organization, was the main group pushing for legislation in Oregon, Thomas-Beck said.

Part of Senate Bill 612 requires that school districts have at least one teacher in each K-5 or K-8 school who has received training related to dyslexia by Jan. 1, 2018.

That teacher will act as a resource who can help fellow teachers carry out the screening of risk factors.

Thomas-Beck worked with stakeholders, including the Oregon Education Association and Oregon School Boards Association, to draft a plan for universal screening. The drafting took about six months, and was submitted to the interim legislative committee on education by September. That committee will decide whether to approve the plan.

The draft plan names a few risk factors to screen for, Thomas-Beck said, including formological awareness, a student's ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language; letter-sound correspondences, a student's ability to map a sound to print; rapid naming; and any family history of difficulty of learning to read.

Rapid naming involves asking a child to look at a set of familiar items rapidly presented, such as numbers, letters or pictures of things like a boat or cat, and name them. Schools can find out about family difficulties with learning to read by asking for that information on an enrollment form.

Most schools will continue to use the same Response to Intervention method they already do, in which universal screening helps identify where students belong in multitiered instruction. The tiered approach allows teachers to adapt instruction to a student's needs, such as dyslexia.

Sanford Shapiro, founder of the Bend Learning Center, which includes in its offerings tutoring for dyslexic students, said he's thrilled to see the legislation come through.

“It's kind of a hidden disability,” said Shapiro, who has worked with dyslexic children for 30 years. His son is also dyslexic.

He also discussed how dyslexia is genetic.

“Humans are wired for spoken language; babies learn to talk unless they're raised by wolves,” he said. “But you have to be taught to read. Our brains are not wired to read unless you're taught.”

For people with dyslexia, there's a difficulty in fluent and accurate reading and writing.

“It's a sort of struggle to manage speech sounds within words,” Shapiro said. “They don't understand the code of speech, of letter sounds with printed symbols.”

Just as Thomas-Beck noted, Shapiro said students with dyslexia have no shortage of intelligence or comprehension. “Kids can tell you all about the lunar landing module, but they can't spell the word ‘ship,’” Shapiro said.

Shapiro said whether it's in Oregon or someplace else in the country, many schools have not really recognized dyslexia until this point.

“They're naming the word dyslexia, which is really important,” Shapiro said of legislators.

He'd like to see all children taught to read in the same way he teaches children with dyslexia. Unlike many public schools, the technique he uses, called the Orton/Gillingham-based approach, doesn't require kids to memorize. Children are often taught to memorize so-called sight words such as “are,” ‘'of“ and ”for." Instead, Shapiro's technique focuses on breaking down words into parts, teaching children to read in a way that's similar to how you would teach them a foreign language.

But for now, he's glad there's progress at the state level. Shapiro is pleased to see the legislation requires teachers who receive training related to dyslexia will need to have training that follows an international standard.

It will help him and other educators be on the same page when it comes to educating students with dyslexia.

___

Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com

]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800WARRENTON — The Coast Guard is seeking the public's help to find someone who has made repeated false calls for help from near the mouth of the Columbia River.

The U.S. Coast Guard said in a news release that Coast Guard Sector Columbia River Command Center personnel have taken 22 hoax calls since April. Officials believe the calls were made by the same person.

Officials say the calls have come from Chinook, Washington, or anywhere between Warrenton and Seaside, Oregon.

Based on voice analysis conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, the suspect is believed to be a white man, age 35 to 40, with an East Coast to Southeastern Coast accent. The analysis also says the man could be around 6 feet tall and 190 pounds.

People with information are asked to call the Sector Columbia River command center at 503-338-9021.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday that America will stick with Afghanistan for years to come as a new U.S. president takes over what is already America's longest war.

In a joint appearance In Kabul with Afghanistan's president, Ashraf Ghani, Carter said the U.S. cannot afford to give up on Afghanistan after more than 15 years of U.S. involvement, the deaths of more than 2,200 U.S. troops, and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars.

“The interests we are pursuing here are clear and enduring,” he said, citing the goals of preventing another 9/11-type of attack on American soil and helping Afghanistan attain enough stability to remain a long-term security partner for the U.S. and the West. The war began as a response to the 9/11 attacks.

“To have a stable security partner that is eager and willing to work with the United States is an asset for the future for us,” Carter said.

Carter was making his last planned trip to Afghanistan before handing off his Defense Department responsibilities to his successor. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for the post.

Trump has not said if or how he will alter the U.S. course in Afghanistan, but has denounced what he calls U.S. nation-building projects.

The U.S. has about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan to train and advise Afghan security forces combatting a resilient Taliban insurgency. U.S. special operations forces are hunting down al-Qaida and Islamic State militants.

Carter's visit comes amid concerns that despite improvements in Afghan government defenses, Taliban forces are gaining leverage and are continuing to use neighboring Pakistan as a sanctuary. By U.S. estimates, the Afghan government controls slightly less than two-thirds of the country's population.

The Taliban holds sway over about 10 percent, and the remainder of the population is “contested.”

The top US commander in Afghanistan said Friday “the fundamental logic” of the U.S. counterterrorism mission is solid, suggesting it should continue after the change of administrations.

“Our policy of having an enduring counterterrorism effort alongside Afghan partners is, in my view, very sound — something that we need to continue,” Army Gen. John Nicholson told a news conference in Bagram.

Appearing alongside Nicholson, Carter said that having “a stable security partner that is eager and willing to work with the United States is an asset for the future for us.”

U.S. commanders have praised Afghan soldiers for taking the lead in battles against the less-well equipped Taliban, but they have been suffering heavy casualties.

Before Carter's arrival, his press secretary, Peter Cook, said Carter wanted to get a full rundown on operations. He said Carter would discuss “the growing capabilities and resilience demonstrated by Afghan security forces in recent months,” as well as efforts to build “Afghan combat capacity including aviation.”

President Barack Obama had planned to reduce U.S. troop numbers to about 1,000 by the time he left office in January, but he scrapped that approach in the face of Taliban gains.

ATLANTA — The cries of trapped hotel guests screaming in agony are still seared into Richard Hamil's memory, seven decades after the Winecoff Hotel fire in Atlanta.

As a 9-year-old boy, he and his father were blinded in thick smoke, stumbling from their 15th-floor room into the hallway in “absolute chaos,” then into a female guest's room, Hamil recalls.

“She was preparing to jump, but Daddy told her, ‘No, not until we have to, we won't do that,” he said.

The deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history killed 119 people 70 years ago this week and led to new and lasting fire safety standards for hotels and other public buildings. Now investigators are looking into violations of those standards in Oakland, California, where 36 people perished at a Dec. 2 concert inside the “Ghost Ship” warehouse.

“I bet they sweep their city and say ‘no more of this,’” said Allen Goodwin, who co-authored the book “The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire.”

“It moves it up the priority scale when lives are lost, and that's exactly what happened with the Winecoff fire on a global basis,” Goodwin said.

Following the Oakland fire, local officials say they're looking to strengthen regulations for smoke alarms and exits. New regulations also are being considered, such as enhanced fire inspections and monitoring illegal events, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement this week.

Nationally, the Oakland fire is a reminder that fire threats continue to change, partly because of social media, and learning from the blazes can lead to stronger fire safety standards, National Fire Protection Association President Jim Pauley said in a statement.

“In Oakland, the changing occupancy of that building may have only been known to those who lived or worked there, not to the fire service or other officials,” he said. “This is likely a scenario happening in other places around the country. The ability to attract large numbers of people to an unknown venue is easy through new ways of social media. Couple that with the rate of speed, things can go from bad to worse when there are blocked or not enough exits and lots of combustibles.”

The Dec. 7, 1946, Atlanta inferno came near the end of a dreadful year for hotel fires. Months earlier, 61 people were killed in a Chicago hotel fire and 19 others perished in a hotel blaze in Dubuque, Iowa.

The burning hotels were huge news, Goodwin said. In the Atlanta fire, an amateur photographer captured the horror of a woman leaping from the building to escape the flames, an image that was distributed by The Associated Press and won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

Cities across the nation began strengthening their fire codes after the Winecoff fire, Goodwin said, and President Harry S. Truman called for a national convention to find ways to prevent more deaths.

“The great hotel fires of last year again showed that we cannot afford to entrust our citizens’ lives to unsafe buildings,” Truman said in his opening address to The President's Conference on Fire Prevention in Washington, D.C., in 1947, according to documents from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Missouri.

The conference program urged attendees to “aggressively support this national war against the growing menace of fire.”

The Winecoff fire led to new building codes requiring multiple fire exits. The Winecoff had only one staircase near the center of the building, which acted as a chimney to loft smoke and fire into the hotel's upper floors, according to documents from the Atlanta History Center.

Self-closing “fire doors” also came about after the Winecoff fire, which fed on air that was released when guests opened doors and transoms.

Hamil and his father managed to escape only because their top floor was nearly on a level with the Mortgage Guarantee Building next door. A custodian from that building placed a ladder across the alley to rescue him.

“I heard somebody say ‘grab the ladder,’ and I thought it was coming from the ground, but it wasn't. It was coming from straight across,” Hamil said. “There were only three people on our floor who survived — my dad, myself and this lady from Mississippi. The rest of the people perished on that floor.”

The Winecoff, built in 1913, remained standing after the fire but eventually became vacant and stayed that way for years. It underwent a multimillion dollar makeover a decade ago and reopened in 2007 as the Ellis Hotel.

This week Hamil drove from his home in Dawsonville, Georgia, into downtown Atlanta to mark the fire's anniversary.

Hamil had been at the Winecoff because he was tagging along with his father, an adviser to students who'd traveled to Atlanta for a mock legislative program at the state Capitol. Thirty of the youths perished in the blaze, which added to the nation's collective grief, Goodwin said.

“It shook the world, and it broke hearts all over Georgia,” he said.

This week, Hamil, now 79, visited the 10th-floor room where four boys from the youth gathering died. He called it surreal. Now, he and others are remembering how catastrophic loss led to better safety standards.

“For 119 people to perish, to have something good come out of that is absolutely good,” he said.